Arthur Allen loves tomatoes

Arthur Allen's latest book is "Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato."

His books can be purchased through Amazon.com and at major bookstores.

Q: Tell me about your latest book, "Ripe."

A: It's a freewheeling romp through Tomatoland, equal parts history, science and journalism.

I picked tomatoes with Mam- and Popti-speaking farm workers for subminimum wages in southern Florida, explored the processing tomato industry of China, climbed Mt. Vesuvius in search of dry-farmed piennolo tomatoes, ate my way through organic cherry tomato fields in Baja, Calif., with master breeder Kanti Rawal and examined the history of the mechanical tomato processor and the simultaneously developed mechanically processed tomato.

Q: What is it about tomatoes that you like so much?

A: I like tomatoes about as much as the next guy or gal. When they are good, they are very, very good and when they are bad, they are ... nutritious.

What I found interesting was the amount of passion centered upon them, because they seem to embody a lot of our thoughts about what food should be, our memories of childhood eating experiences, our suspicion of genetic modification and commercialization of food in general, even our sense of social justice. A lot of blood runs through the tomato story.

And it was a way for me to learn a bit about the farming and food business, to demystify it for myself.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: A book about typhus under Nazi rule. I am focusing on two Polish typhus vaccine researchers, a Jew and a Catholic, neither religious, who used the Nazi fear of the louse and its diseases to save lives under conditions that ranged from awkward to gruesome to simply too horrible almost for words.

Q: What advice would you give to local writers?

A: Get another job if you want to make money. Otherwise, what is there to say except follow your passion, work hard and try to find new things?

Q: How do you choose what subjects to write a full-length book about?

A: I'm interested in the stories behind things of everyday use.

It's amazing how much technology there is all around us to the point that we don't even notice most of it.

You never think about what vaccines do until you have an infant who's about to get stuck with a lot of needles.

That's how I got started on "Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver" when my son was born in 1996. It turned out that vaccines have a fascinating history, lots of Sturm und Drang and fascinating characters and they have a unique ability, among medical interventions, to terrify people.

As for 'maters, I wanted to write about a food, the whole story of how it got here, the endless mutations in nature and the human tinkering and toil, from the lab bench (in some cases) to the fields to our plates.